What Victoria Woodhull’s Presidential Run Can Teach Us About America Today

On April 2, 1870, two years before the 1872 U.S. presidential election, a letter to the editor of the New York Herald appeared in its pages, announcing a campaign for the presidency against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. The letter was signed by Victoria Woodhull.

Woodhull, who had been born poor in an Ohio frontier settlement, embodied the ethos of America, a try-anything country with radical individualism at its heart.  Despite a childhood mired in poverty and dictated by physically abusive parents, she went on to co-found a successful brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870, making a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, profits which she later used to launch a newspaper. The paper’s progressive contributors wrote essays and articles proposing changes that would gain traction decades later, such as the abolition of the death penalty and welfare for the poor. But the most improbable aspect among an abundance of improbabilities in Woodhull’s life was this single fact: she was a woman.

Trapped in a system that oppressed her gender in every conceivable way, Woodhull forged her success with novelty, enterprise, courage, and determination in what became a rags-to-riches story that intersected predominantly with men, among whom were Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Frederick Douglass, and the Prince of Wales.  In a time when political ambitions were believed to be only a male prerogative, she faced down restrictions that almost always crushed those had by women.  With a combination of pragmatism, imagination, and expert guile, she engineered an unprecedented meeting in front of a congressional committee to appeal to them directly on behalf of a woman’s right to vote. She formed a third political party whose coalition included laborers, abolitionists, spiritualists, and suffragists and whose agenda proposed an overhaul of the U.S. government, including a one-term presidency, an eight-hour workday, national public Education, and the establishment of an international tribunal to settle international disputes.

That women were not allowed to hold political office or vote didn’t present an obstacle to Woodhull’s presidential campaign. “I anticipate criticism,” she said, then added, "[but] they cannot roll back the rising tide of reform. The world moves."

The world moved slower than had been wished for: it took another 48 years for women to be granted the right to vote.

One hundred and four years after that, a question persists: what will it take for America to elect a woman president, assuming she is fundamentally able?

Read More: The Radical Woman Whose 19th Century Ideas Still Undergird the LGBTQ-Rights Movement

Kamala Harris’ failure to win the presidential election is being explained differently by different people. Some say it had to do with timing: had President Biden bowed out sooner, there could have been other candidates in the race; at the very least, Harris would have been given more time to make her case to the voters. Though Trump’s racist messaging resonated with a substantial number of people, Harris’ defeat cannot simply be reduced to the color of her skin, though it undeniably played a significant role in the decisions of voters. And it wasn’t just about class, the economy, or securing the borders and illegal immigrants. Rather, it was in part about how American men and women perceive these issues through the lens of their gendered experience.

One might ask how much of the Democratic Party’s failure had to do with ignoring what both sexes believe should be the gender of power? The stereotypical masculine traits conveyed as strength of leadership are often prized over what can be safely assumed to be feminine traits of compromise. Because ambition in a woman was considered unsavory, Victoria Woodhull insisted that she was no more than a vessel through which an otherworldly inspiration was acting for a greater good. That ploy made little difference when she announced her intention to run for the presidency: she managed to offend not just men but women, some within the suffrage movement. Similarly, 120 years later, when Bill Clinton was President and Hilary Clinton suggested that her ambitions extended beyond the traditional role of First Lady, the public’s reaction was so adverse that she was pressured into a public relations cookie bake-off with her Republican counterpart, Barbara Bush. Whether women hold other women to a higher standard than men is debatable but, despite—or, perhaps, because of—the effort to reposition Hilary Clinton among voters as a non-threatening candidate, she lost to Donald Trump. She was smart and capable. She was also irritating to some women voters, many of whom granted immunity to the willfully ignorant and morally insolvent Donald Trump.

How men and women perceive a woman in a position of leadership and in possession of political power is far from clear-cut. Kamala Harris was right to recognize that a glass ceiling strategy doesn’t necessarily win converts. She and her party constantly reminded them that Trump was a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and at best, a misogynist proud to have appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. And yet while many people did vote to overturn abortion bans in their states, they did not necessarily vote for Harris, who performed worse than other women democrats or people of color.

Did the women who defected to the republican ticket believe that Harris wasn’t the right person to lead the country—or that women in general are incapable of meeting the demands of being President?

Read More: The Democrats’ Blame Game Begins

What of the men?  To the 19th century America male, Victoria Woodhull represented a new kind of femaleness that meant the death of a certain type of maleness.  The backlash unleashed attempts by the press to discredit her and resulted in a wrongful jail sentence. Trump’s strategy of convincing men—young men especially—of a type of woman punishing them for just for being men, is not without precedent. He returns to the White House thanks in large part to 54% of male voters.

The “why’s” of Harris’ resounding and swift defeat will be put to rest when the end of dismantling its reasons gives way to constructing a new beginning. Victoria Woodhull knew that it was impossible for her to actually become President. Her campaign had a single purpose: to challenge Americans to consider whether a woman could lead a country. Since Woodhull’s death in 1927, some 85 countries—from Western democracies to Military dictatorships—have answered that question in the affirmative by choosing women as their leaders. For America, however, Woodhull’s challenge remains unanswered.